So you have a website–great. But so do your competitors. If you want your site to help drive sales for your business in 2012, it has to be a better website and stand out from the rest.
Amplify your content. One of the ways you can easily work to get your content read more–and at no financial cost–is to ensure audiences on sites such as StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com), Digg (http://digg.com), Google Plus (http://plus.google.com), Facebook, and Twitter are suggesting your content to their networks. Lauren Whitson of Web hosting company 1&1 Internet Inc. advises that the more relevant and unique your content is, the higher search engines will rank your site. You can use the StumbleUpon tool bar to suggest your content to others. You should also add social widgets and plug-ins to your site. Twitter and Facebook make it easy to integrate social content on your website.
Make e-commerce easy. If you’re selling products online, it’s important that you make the selling process as frictionless as possible. For example, while having a shopping cart on your website is great, there are apps designed for Facebook that enable customers to shop and buy from you right within the social networking site. Intuit’s SimpleStore and the app Central.ly (http://central.ly/) can help you do this.
Improve navigation. Your customers are busier than ever and their eyes are staring at blinking screens all day long. Boost the navigation of your site so that visitors can quickly find the content they want and what you want them to find. You can hire a Web designer on Elance (www.elance.com) or get a recommendation from your local chamber of commerce.